With the Wild Beasts
You’re going to croak. And there’s an app for that.
My friend Suzanne told me about this simple smartphone app called “We Croak” that’s a fabulous spiritual tool.
At five random times throughout the day, it sends you a notification on your smartphone reminding you that you will one day die. It gives you a quote on death by an artist or spiritual teacher or public figure.
The point is to help us put the everyday concerns that dominate our minds into perspective.
When you are reminded that your life is short, your time on this earth is limited, and in the end, very little will remain of your daily preoccupations once you’re gone, things lessen in intensity a bit.
You’re reminded of what really matters.
You step back from the everyday grind, the sometimes relentless stress of trying to keep up with your to-do list, and remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
There is a rich tradition of meditating on mortality in both the Christian and the Buddhist traditions.
Human life is fleeting, but we are all too prone to waste our precious time on small, petty concerns. We can’t help it. The urgent takes over the important, and the years fly by.
But we have an entire church season devoted to contemplating our mortality.
It’s a ready-made tool to think about how we’re using the time we’ve been given, and the best part is that we take it on together. Lent is a communal journey.
There’s no better place to wrestle with the great questions of life and death and eternity, of sin and redemption and love, than in our Christian community.
And it turns out that a simple tool on a smartphone could help us keep those deep questions a little closer to the forefront of our minds. Who says technology and spirituality are diametrically opposed?
A line from our gospel today caught my eye.
Mark’s account of Jesus’ time in the wilderness is so sparse that it’s frustrating. We have to use our imaginations to fill in the blanks.
Jesus gets baptized, he goes into the desert, and then he’s back in Galilee, beginning his public ministry and preaching.
And all we get to describe that pivotal wilderness period is two paltry sentences from Mark: “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”
The phrase that jumped out at me as I read it this time was “he was with the wild beasts.”
That sounds kind of intimidating.
What was that really like? Continue reading